Does your flowerbed or garden ever get away from you? Where will it stop? Or will it absorb and grow right over you?
I’m interested in and love all kinds of plants. Therefore, after one writers’ conference in Florida when I found a fascinating large seed on the ground in a park, I plopped it in my suitcase to bring home to Minnesota. Dark brown and hard, it looked like an avocado stone but was larger and more pitted.
We couldn’t identify it online. I gave it no food or encouragement, but it sprouted. A week later, that sprout measured 5”. In a month, my mystery seed had produced a three-foot long curving reddish green vine with alternating leaves that completed one clockwise rotation each 24-hours. Then I realized it was really casting about for something to encircle and twine around. “It’s alive,” I warned my family, adding that if I sat at my computer too long and the mystery vine entrapped me, they should break in and rescue me. I was joking—but the vine kept advancing.
It grew six inches in a single day. I phoned a Florida horticultural expert I found online. He asked me to photograph the thing and send pictures. He had me do further online research to make sure I was not harboring the dreaded noxious Air Potato, imported from Africa in 1905. Horrors! I was and enabling that rapidly growing invasive pest. It’s a species of true yam, Dioscoreaeae, native to Africa, Asia and northern Australia. It grew wildly, surpassing anything I’d ever planted but produces poisonous fruit. I “gifted” it to my toxicologist son who wanted it to study. It’s more prolific and damaging in parts of the South than kudzu vines, also imported from Africa.
Moral? Be careful what you bring home and give life to. How does this relate to writing and life? We find original ideas anywhere—keepers—or not. At first, we don’t know if they’ll germinate or what life forms they might produce. We may admire, water, prune, and possibly end up pulling them up by the roots to safeguard our lives!
May we be inspired and wise in the seeds we plant to get the harvests we want.
Meanwhile, I’ve nearly completed my Amish book. I’m happy my nearest Amish neighbor has read a fair bit of it and is pleased—I wouldn’t want to offend.
I hope your summer is great and full of surprise blessings. Mine is. You’ll hear more about that soon. Until next time,
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